contributors

To achieve moody, evocative images like those accompanying “Focusing,” photographer Abelardo Morell uses a centuries-old technique called camera obscura (Latin for “darkened room”), precursor to modern photography. Morell first covers the windows of a room in black plastic, creating a totally dark space. He then cuts a small hole in the plastic, through which an upside-down image of the exterior scene is projected onto the walls, floors, and ceiling of the room, and superimposed on its contents. Creating these surreal images has taken Morell—a Cuban native who now lives near Boston—from “my own living room to all sorts of interiors around the world,” he says.
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Rob Schultheis, a journalist, painter, and adventurer, covers the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. He lives in the mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, with his wife-an artist and tour guide whom he married at a monastery at the base of Mt. Everest in a "casual ceremony." His newest book is Fool's Gold: Lives, Loves and Misadventures in Four Corners County (Lyons Press).
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Linda Heuman (“Whose Buddhism is Truest?”) is a freelance journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Heuman has practiced Tibetan Buddhism (in the Gelug, Kagyu, and Nyingma traditions) for two decades under the guidance of Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and Ven. Christine Skarda.Heuman’s dharma story began in India and Nepal. In the early 1990s, she practiced in both countries, traveling between Bodhgaya, Dharamsala, Dehra Dun, and Kathmandu. She served in India as retreat attendant for Skarda and continues to work closely with her.
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Andrew Schelling, poet, Zen student, and translator of India's old verse, teaches at Naropa University. Regarding his essay "Bardo of Lost Mammals," he remarks: "Buddhist texts old and new refer to the interdependence of all forms of life, an insight supported by everything I learn about ecology. To me, this means that in a period of widespread environmental degradation, the neighborhood, the watershed, or the bioregion becomes the 'hall of practice.'''
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In 2000, Joel Whitney (“No Mean Preacher”) had just left Tricycle, where he was website editor, to pursue an M.F.A. in poetry at Columbia. By 2003, he was teaching at Fordham University, had won a Discovery Prize for his poems, and was working on a poetry collection. But the week the first bombs fell on Baghdad, Joel was in Costa Rica, a nation with no military. He stayed on the beach in a hotel run by a French-Swiss couple. The morning after the family had watched videos of the bombing, their five-year-old daughter told Joel, “You are bad.” Joel agreed, marched in San José against the war, and began to write on politics. In 2004, he cofounded the online magazine Guernica, hoping to bring together literary work in translation by outstanding national writers and journalism on politics, human rights, and international affairs.
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Misha Gordin, the award-winning photographer (here), set out to be an aviation engineer. But after technical college in his native Latvia, he joined the special effects department of Riga Motion Picture studios instead. At 19, he took up photography, shooting portraits and documentary stills. He soon found those forms unsatisfactory, however, and put aside his camera to concentrate on Russian literature and cinematography. (He counts Dostoevsky among his major influences.) Always searching “for a way to express my personal feelings and thoughts using photography,” in 1972 he hit on a vehicle: capturing ideas rather than literal moments on film. Turning the camera inward, on his “soul,” Gordin produced his first conceptual photograph, Confession.
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